PHIL 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Syntactic Ambiguity, Enthymeme, Polysemy
26 May 2020
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Document Summary
If something is somewhere between red and orange, it may be a borderline case of something red. If something is vague, like red for example, then it has borderline cases and clear cases. But there are also cases where it is unclear if it fits into clear case or a borderline case. It is unclear if this object is a clear case of a red object or a borderline case (there can be borderline cases of borderline cases!) The line between the clear cases and the borderline is itself vague. In the moral domain, things are famously vague, but again there are clear cases when something is unjust (for instance). This is an example of syntactic ambiguity (and bad writing). The ambiguity arises due to the (poor) construction of the sentence. Lexical ambiguity is when a string of spoken sounds or written letters have more than one possible meaning.
